In this week’s The New Yorker (Aug. 15 & 22, 2011), Alex Ross reflects on his experiences at the Bayreuth Festival. As a Wagnerite, I have often dreamed of going to Bayreuth to see the Ring Cycle, but the last I checked, procuring tickets was a lengthy, complicated and expensive process lasting years. After reading Ross’s lamentations on the avant-garde productions at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, I am a little less disappointed that I will likely never attend the festival.
This year’s festival includes a performance of Tannhauser. Tannhauser is about a minstrel knight who, after spending a year and a day enjoying pagan delights with Venus, is refused forgiveness by the Pope, but ultimately achieves it through his pure love for Elisabeth. The opera is based on the historical German minnesanger and poet Tannhauser, who lived in the 13th Century, as well as legends and mythology, and features various Medieval personages such as a landgrave and a healthy helping of nubile demi-goddesses and fantastical creatures—The Three Graces, sirens, naiads, nymphs and bacchantes—so where better to set the action than in a “dystopian waste-recycling facility” (Ross) dominated by a pre-existing piece of art that is, in the words of its creator the installation artist Joep van Lieshout, a “closed circuit of food, alcohol, excrement, and energy”?
I must admit, I am generally not a fan of this type of avant-garde reimagining and updating of a classic dramatic work, although it appears to be the norm in opera productions.
I can speak from experience. In May this year, my wife and I went to see Siegfried at the San Francisco Opera House. Siegfried is about a boisterous young man who leaves his home in the forest, slays a dragon and takes its treasure, confronts his father Wotan (the ruler of the gods), and finally ascends mountainous heights, where he traverses a ring of magic fire and finds a sleeping Valkyrie with whom he promptly falls in love. The pre-performance speaker described the SF Opera’s production as beginning on the outskirts of an urban wasteland, and indeed, the curtain rose on a junkyard with a blasted trailer home in it. In Act Two, the dragon Fafner was a mechanical beast that looked like an overgrown four-wheeler with the head of a cheap robot toy. The quality of the musical performance was fine, but the early sets were cringe-inducing.
Luckily, these urban elements faded somewhat after the slaying of Fafner. The rest of Act Two was dominated by bright-green forest imagery projected on a screen, in front of which flitted the Woodbird in a bright red outfit. Act Three mostly took place in scenery suggesting rocky heights, soaring and majestic for the meeting between Wotan and Erda the earth goddess and turbulent for the awakening love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde. The second half of the opera was much more enjoyable as it assumed a congruence with the music and dramatic action.
The people who design such productions as described above are no doubt incredibly talented musicians, directors, producers, set designers, and so forth, but I must cry from my seat in Philistia that they have missed the essence of the work. All their theory—of which they have too much—is wrong. The music, characters and stories speak for themselves and as plainly today as they did in Wagner’s day and do not need any meddling by us.
I suspect the artsy elite simply look down their noses at fantasy, even fantasy of the mythological type present in many of the greatest operas. They would not be caught dead reading David Gemmell, nor would they put a horned helm on Brunnhilde’s head unless it were over the dead body of their sophistication. That is all so tacky and old-fashioned. But that is where the real power is. History, myth and imagination are much bigger and meaningful than any narrow commentary on our own times, no matter how cleverly contrived.
Wagner knew that—after all, he set most of his stories in a mythical past rather than a context more literally resembling the Europe of his own day—and we should too. According to Ross in his article, boos have become part of the standard Bayreuth repertoire. It’s hard to imagine that would be so if the original operas were allowed to shine.
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